Tag: San Fernando Valley

1956: Crazy Times

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These are a selection of violent news stories from just a few months in 1956, mostly related to people in Van Nuys, but also in Canoga Park and Burbank.

It is common to look back at the 1950s, especially in Los Angeles, as a less violent and less chaotic era. Old-time residents of the San Fernando Valley remember it as a verdant, peaceful, fun, and safe place. 

But there was actually a 62% increase in crime in the SFV from 1954-55.[1]

More Police Asked for West Part of Valley

True one could buy a house for $14,000. But the average US household income in 1956 was $5,000 a year or about $96 (before tax) dollars a week.  And nobody drove their children to school in Los Angeles. The kids walked or biked. Affordable houses and children on foot: two extinct attributes of life in Southern California.

Then, as now, the horrors of sudden death were attributable to two beloved things profuse in our city: cars and guns. 

1/9/56: Burbank motorcycle officer, William Catlin, 44, said he owes his life to citizens who helped him subdue youth he said threatened to kill him during questioning. Reginald Lemon, 18 was booked on suspicion of assault with intent to commit murder.

5/14/56: Three persons were shot to death, a fourth critically wounded, at 19859 Saticoy St., Canoga Park. Regis Johnston, 35 went berserk and killed his wife Jean, 30 and Bessie Mungall, 35 and wounded Bessie’s husband John, 40. Regis Johnston then took his own life by shotgun.

6/18/56: Rudolph Liberace, 24, of Van Nuys, brother of pianist Lee Liberace, is shown in jail after his arrest as a burglary suspect.

9/30/56: Protecting the mid 1950s’ 600,000 residents of the San Fernando Valley (2018: 1.75 million) were 418 LAPD officers who were crammed into the 1933 Van Nuys City Hall which was designed to only house 45 cops. The new regional police buildings that were later built around the San Fernando Valley in the late 1950s and early 1960s helped alleviate the primitive conditions of the old headquarters.

10/18/56: In the midst of a strike by laborers at Hydro-Aire, Inc. in Burbank, a striker’s wife in Van Nuys, Mrs. Patricia Laszlo, 21, of 9920 Saticoy St. was cooking dinner when a masked, leather jacketed thug entered the house and beat her and knocked her out. He struck her in the abdomen and threatened to burn her fingers on a stove if her husband, James Laszlo, 22, a machinist, did not return to work. The International Association of Machinists, Lodge 727 is the union picketing the plant at 3000 Winona St. Burbank.

10/23/56: Twenty-one juveniles were arrested for vandalism including Robert E. Farmer, 18 of 15001 Paddock St., Van Nuys who was apprehended by custodians as he and a friend attempted to crack a safe in the student store at San Fernando High School, 11133 O’Melveny St. Both were booked on suspicion of burglary.

11/23/56: A 31-year old mother of a 10-year-old boy took a 22-caliber rifle, shot her son to death and then killed herself. Julia McIrvin of 7240 Woodman Ave., Van Nuys, died in the Valley Emergency Hospital along with her son. Twice divorced, she suffered from mental issues.

11/30/56: A Youth Dies, 4 Hurt in 3-Car Smashup on Sepulveda. The youth was a native of Germany, Karl Schmidl, 21, who was driving southbound in his lightweight, imported car when he plowed into a northbound car with four people driven by Leonard W. Kraska, 30, of 14259 Vanowen St. Van Nuys; James Robert Parker, 48 of 9261 Wakefield Ave, Van Nuys; and Earl Schapps, 53, of 8850 Tyrone Ave. Van Nuys.

[1]10/4/1956 LA Times: “More Police Asked For West Part of Valley”

Densmore and Stagg, N. of Saticoy.

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Drive west on Saticoy St., past the 405 and turn right/north, onto Densmore Avenue. 

You are still, according to Google Maps, in Van Nuys. (all apologies to Lake Balboa, which seems to have some fourteen boundariesaround its neighborhood.)

On Densmore, near Stagg, you’ll find, as I did, a neat, monotonous, hard-working district of small companies; mostly hidden behind bricks and barred windows.

Creative Age Productions at 7628 Densmore is there. They publish beauty magazines. Nailpro, Eyelash and Dayspa are some of their best-known publications. These titles are often competing with mirrors for customer attention.

They are neighbors with: Superior Shipping Supplies, New Rule Productions, Regency Fire Protection; and Kedem Properties, 7752 Densmore, which sounds like a Kosher wine but is actually a commercial property company. 

Black Sheep Enterprises, at 15745 Stagg, manufactures theatrical and stage drapery, a specialty one cannot buy off the shelves of Target.

The Katsu-Ya Group at 15819 Stagg owns nine sushi restaurants around the Southland. They are incongruously housed in a white and brown brick Mexican style building with arched designs.

Katsu-Ya Headquarters at 15819 Stagg St.

And the American Rubber and Supply Co. at 15849 Stagg St. has been in business since 1947 and is a supplier of industrial rubber products. Your car mat, your yoga mat, and your kitchen mat, next to the kitchen sink, might have all come from here.

New Rule FX at 7751 Densmore makes special effects props and supplies for movies, TV and theater. If you need piles of fake US currency, realistic cheeseburgers in rubber, or a room full of exploding balsa wood furniture , then this is the place to shop.  Their free-floating, fantastical, imaginative fantasies are constructed behind a dismal, prisonlike façade of white cinderblocks and steel bars.

Where Stagg St. bisects Densmore Ave is Mission Industrial Park, announced by a two-posted, two-fisted, old Western kind of sign with raised letters on a wide wooden board hung 20’ high over the street.  It welcomes you to a white-walled alley of various buildings presumably under one owner who felt compelled to establish an identity for her vastly unremarkable assemblage.

Mission Industrial Park.

We went all around here, on public sidewalks, a few days ago, to shoot some photos for a mens’ fashion brand called Magill Los Angeles.  

James and Carter were the models.

Along Densmore Av. Carter (L) and James.

James was 19 and had long blonde hair and said he was born in South Los Angeles but had moved with his father to North Dakota. He was now living in New York City and visiting Hollywood to strike up a modeling career. He had the dazed and confused 70s aura from juvenile and stoned Reseda. He works at McDonalds now but may well be famous in 2029.

Carter, actor, came from North Carolina and was well-read, articulate and sensitive to both words and pollen.

James

The day was sunny, the wind was blowing, the boys were happy and we went to eat tacos later at Tacos Hell Yeah which they said was their best ever meal in LA.

Tacos Hell Yeah
7607 White Oak Ave, Reseda, CA 91335

____________________________________________________________

Those industrial compounds, like the Stagg/Densmore District, are the hidden places in the San Fernando Valley that nobody knows about. 

Tidy, productive, industrious, they are the old lifeblood of Los Angeles, where your late Uncle Bernie, with the cigar in his mouth and the bad gallbladder, set up shop after the war and bought a three bedroom, rock-roofed ranch up on Zelzah Avenue with a delightful kidney-shaped pool.

He had little patience for tears, or men who didn’t know the difference between a wrench or a pliers, having served up ice cream at Montgomery Ward until he enlisted in ’42 and saw action at Guadalcanal. He was never bored, because he was always busy, and you vowed you would never become Uncle Bernie but you’ve done quite worse, haven’t you? He had work and a family, and a company, and a paid for house and you made fun of it, but now life laughs at you.

Aside from the work that goes on inside these shops, there is nothing to do in this area for someone in search of stimulation. Densmore and Stagg and parts around here are boring, without street life. Yet men and women in these enterprises are engaged in work, absorbed in inventions, and creating products that are, in many respects, quite interesting.

Along Stagg St.

Magill: Target/N. Van Nuys
(Not near the Densmore/Stagg/ Mission Industrial District)
James on the Raymer St. Bridge, Van Nuys, CA.

6353 Van Nuys Bl.

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6353 Van Nuys Bl is at the NW corner of Friar St and VNB, one block south of Victory.

I recently came across a commercial real estate advertisement for this building.

It is a 1939, streamline moderne style structure with 7,330 feet of leaseable space. Asking price to purchase is $2.1 million dollars.

The property description is very pleasant, sounding like a building that Mildred Pierce might have set her eyes upon:

“This renovated property is located at the signalized intersection of the northwest corner of Friar St. & Van Nuys Blvd. in Van Nuys, in close proximity to many government agencies, local institutions as well as a dozen car dealerships, all within a 2-mile radius. The Los Angeles Superior Court, the LA Department of Building and Safety, the Van Nuys Library and the DMV Office attract a large number of visitors and help to create a traffic count of over 36,000 cars per day. The property is located in an Opportunity Zone.”

On the DWP historical site, there is a photograph of this building, and that corner, and the bustling, prosperous, clean, diagonal parking surroundings of Van Nuys Boulevard in the 1950s. It housed an Owl Drug Store, a chain of its time. Back then, like now, Angelenos spent a large amount of their leisure time walking around drug stores and imagining that various potions for sale would restore youth and keep one alive for many years.

“Postcard view looking north on Van Nuys Boulevard toward Friar Street with Owl Drug Store at the N/W corner.  Across the street, on the N/E corner, stands Cowdrey’s Pharmacy and the Beneficial Finance Company office.  Behind that can be seen the signs for Hart’s Jewelers and the Oasis Club “-DWP

VNB at Victory looking northwest. 1955 (DWP)

That was then. What exists now is too dirty and depraved for the family audience of this blog.

What is the use again of belaboring the tired state of Van Nuys in 2019? But belabor I must……

Beyond the walls of 6353 Van Nuys Bl. hundreds of people sleep on the street, behind alleys, on bus benches. Nobody shops here willingly anymore, in a state of happiness or anticipation or delight.

What we have now are memories of lawful and patrolled streets peopled by legitimate industries from the bad old days when women were living in #metoo times and were forced to wear dresses, hats, gloves, heels, and hose and men were enslaved in lifetime skilled jobs, promised pensions after retirement, with $2 a month health insurance premiums and put into paying $64.99 a month mortgages. Their children walked and rode bikes to local schools, and might have even gone to the corner store to buy candies or add to their stamp collections. Entertainment consisted of many musicals, westerns, dramas, comedies staring such forgotten nobodies as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall or Van Nuys’ Marilyn Monroe.

How lucky we are to be living now when our phones are our life and life beyond our phone is of no interest to us because what we want and desire is entirely online.

Kester Square: Bassett St/1950

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With no down payment, for $44.50 a month, you could buy a brand new, 2 bedroom, 1 bath home in Van Nuys in 1950 starting at $7,950.00 ($83,033.63 today).

Kester Square, a little pocket of 37 new single-family residences, was quickly erected in a few months and planted on old farmland just steps from Kester and Vanowen.

The San Fernando Valley was booming five years after the end of WWII and every smoking factory, every plan to build thousands of little houses on every square inch of land, and the daily, hourly pouring down of asphalt over millions of bulldozed walnut and orange groves was a continual occasion for rejoicing.

In Kester Square, new sewers, paved streets, sidewalks, curbs, lawns and shrubs, along with clothes lines and a backyard incinerator made life very instantly suburban ideal. There was no environmental review, just men in suits with money buying up land and building everywhere.

5/21/50 LA Times

Van Nuys Boulevard, “2 minutes away” from Kester Square, still had chain stores, restaurants, theaters and diagonal parking. It’s ruination, starting with street widening, began in 1955 and it has been on its death bed ever since.

Circa 1950.
1953 Van Nuys Boulevard.

Today when you drive down Bassett St., just west of Kester, a few blocks north of Vanowen, you still encounter a neat, tidy, small home pocket of pleasant houses. The general non-affluence of the area acts as a preservation tool because nobody can afford to or make money tearing down houses and replacing them with oversized uglies.

You would not dare venture out at night to stroll down Kester to Vanowen, but if you stayed home, or went out into your yard, front or back, you would still have a nice place to live, almost 70 years after Floyd C. Fisher, owner-builder, built a couple thousand homes for white veterans and their families.

Vanowen near Kester. Housing in Van Nuys, CA/ 2007.
5 7 1950 LA Times

The New Fire Station

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Long fought, both for and against, a new No. 39 fire station is nearing completion at 14615 Oxnard at Vesper, west of Van Nuys Boulevard.

It replaces a smaller, historic one on Sylvan Street across from the Valley Municipal Building. The older one is from the 1930s, and was a fine looking structure in the Art Deco design of that era. Perhaps a new brewery can move in there when the fire fighting folks vacate.

The new one, picks again from the era of the 1930s, but also borrows from nearby: to an obscure but beautifully designed 1938 structure on Aetna and Vesper, a crisp, elegant, dignified building that once belonged to the DWP.

The new $20 million dollar fire station, an 18,533-square-foot facility, was vigorously objected to, in lawsuits and protests, by residents who live south of the project. They feared noise from the fire engines, and a degradation of housing values.

Just a few years before, this area of Van Nuys emigrated in name to Sherman Oaks, and home prices shot upwards. 

Lost in the din of rebellion was the very low-rent characteristics of the area along Oxnard St. which is a gathering place for homeless people, undocumented day workers and also abuts the over lit and monstrously illuminated car dealerships on Van Nuys Boulevard.  If housing values were not endangered by these facts on the ground, the homeowners believed the proposed fire station would surely be even more detrimental. 

So now, along the south side of Oxnard Street, a new, very tall cinderblock noise wall (future outdoor urinal?) shields homes from the upcoming engine company sirens.  A pedestrian crossing, along with new sidewalks and road improvements upgrades the area.

Modern fire equipment trucks require bigger storage areas, and the old fire station on Sylvan only allowed trucks to back into the station. The new one has garages that the trucks can drive forward into which will add both speed and safety to the operation of mobile equipment.

The only egregiously aesthetic missteps in the new fire station are the cheap looking, burgundy, double-hung windows that look like they were ordered from a Chinese supplier on Amazon Prime. They are squat and graceless and ruin the rhythm and vertical linearity of the design. 

Architecturally, the station takes its place in the old tradition of civic grandeur when buildings such as libraries, police stations, and schools were dignified and placed squarely on the street.

    Sepulveda Fantasy

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    It’s a futile fantasy exercise to go the website Architizer and see what they are building in other wealthy cities around the world where 100,000 homeless people do not sleep on the street and it is isn’t considered normal to have shopping baskets full of trash polluting parks alongside $2.5 million dollar homes.

    Here is a new apartment in Nantes, France designed by Hamonic + Masson & Associates. I think it’s rather pleasing, sleek, uplifting and progressive. It must be nice to live in such a bright, spaciousness, well-thought out structure. 

    Imagine this apartment house along Sepulveda Boulevard between the Orange Line and Victory in Van Nuys, presently a junky, one-story collection of car washes, Pep Boys Auto, Wendy’s, Fatburger, a mini-mall with a mattress store, a paint store, Jiffy Lube, etc. Can you picture the day The Barn is gone and there is nowhere to buy an Amish Shaker Dark Mahogany stained dresser with metal pulls for $953 that even your Aunt Irma in Cerritos would hide in her garage.

    How we would mourn if Pep Buys Auto and its grease, graffiti and garage doors full of axles on hydraulic lifts were banished forever and replaced by something modern and residential befitting a city in the third decade of the 21st Century.

    What would it look like if all that were replaced by a 15- story-tall apartment with curving balconies and pleasing design within walking distance of public transportation, and convenient access to Costco, LA Fitness, Target, CVS and a Chinese market?

    A building like that one replacing all the decrepit garbagetecture that lines Sepulveda between the Orange Line and Victory……imagine that?

    Chief Design Officer?

    Los Angeles should consider creating a position in city government to promote projects like this. I’m thinking a “Chief Design Officer”, perhaps someone with architectural knowledge and connections, to fire up a redesign and redevelopment of Van Nuys.

    I’m surprised they haven’t invented this title yet, since this is such an architecturally minded city. 

    It reminds me of a coincidence……

    I had lunch with a city government man, last summer in Van Nuys. It was July 11, 2018. He rode the bus out to Van Nuys, perhaps for novelty or amusement. I met him on Aetna near the Orange Line. He claimed an important title, one that might be able to bring good things to Van Nuys. I was eager to meet him and see what might get started here.

    We were scheduled to walk around the area and really explore how to improve it. I imagined we might go for a few hours along the boulevard, or the Orange Line, and see what kind of housing, lofts, beer gardens, cafes, tech companies could be built here. But the man was interested, obsessed mostly, in watching the semi-finals of the World Cup when England played Croatia.

    We walked into the dismal State Office Building in Van Nuys, an awful mid-1980s strip windowed government place, and he was transfixed with it. But he still was eager to get somewhere, anywhere, and watch that game.

    Every place we walked past he peered into the windows to see if they had a large screen TV, but alas, none did.

    I suggested the Robin Hood tavern so we took an Uber there and sat amidst the packed crowds and watched the World Cup.

    He had worked as an architecture critic at the LA Times and was coming to our district to see it for the first time, but first he had to watch that soccer match at The Robin Hood. We spent two hours in The Robin Hood, drinking beer and eating BLTs.

    We parted and he promised to follow up and have “my intern” call you. But nobody ever did.

    That was over six months ago.

    The other night he was attending The Golden Mike awards ceremony where KPCC’s Larry Mantle took a lifetime achievement award. So I read on Twitter.

    I’m going to write Mayor Garcetti and Councilwoman Nury Martinez and suggest they create a new government position for someone qualified who can get Van Nuys some top designs and bring up the depressing level of listlessness that infects our forgotten section of Los Angeles.  Needed is a person without pretense who doesn’t just kiss the ass of the fashionable, the powerful, the media stars who blow words and wishes over the suffering people of this city.

    Maybe I should even be the Chief Design Officer since I actually have a track record of preservation, clean-up, and heightening community awareness in Van Nuys and vicinity.  “Option A” which would have obliterated industrial, small shop Van Nuys with a 33-acre Metro light rail repair yard was defeated after this blog united community members to fight for the preservation of local, productive, creative, skilled industries near Kester and Oxnard.

    But back to the CDO position…….

    I don’t think they would hire me.

    Frances Anderton has never heard of me. And I didn’t graduate from Berkeley and I don’t live in Silver Lake. And I have never given a graduation speech to the students at SCI-Arc.

    I’m pretty sure those are the qualifications one needs to get hired for being a $200,000-$300,000 (?) a year Chief Design Officer.